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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26570104">a blood substitute</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/nevergreen/pseuds/nevergreen'>nevergreen</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Rise of the Guardians (2012)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>ARE THEY???, Alternate Universe - Human, M/M, are they tho</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 10:48:43</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,649</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26570104</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/nevergreen/pseuds/nevergreen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Their life together is perfectly depicted by any tinder cryptid profile meme you can found: it's weird, sometimes confusing and they sleep with each other, but that's not what you think.<br/>Oh, and also someone profoundly explains blinking, but it's all <em>ironically</em>, isn't it?</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jack Frost/Pitch Black</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>47</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>a blood substitute</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/gifts"></a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>if you see this go get yourself some water</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Jack changes over time they live together, changes slowly – it’s not that he becomes less reckless, not at all; but his recklessness is spread thin now, less concentrated, if you look from afar, he even slightly resembles a human. He still snuffs out candles with his fingers and creeps out the windows at night, though; Pitch found out when he woke up once, early in the morning, with the sun not even out yet, and all the air in his room was stiff and cold. All the windows in the apartment were opened wide, and Jack’s bed was a ragged mess of wet sheets. A patch of the floor under the opened window in his room was powdered with fine, flour-like snow; under the window, narrow footsteps streaked across the white surface.<br/>
</p><p>Pitch closed all the windows then and went back, to the somberness, the warmth and semi-darkness of his room; then, after half an hour of lying in his bed, comfortable but sleepless, he returned to Jack’s room and opened the window again. “Idiot,” he muffled under his breath, his black hair adorned with snowflakes, “don’t you think he will come back the same way, for real.”</p><p>He still doesn’t know if Jack did, because later that morning he woke up again, in an hour or two, with Jack entangling him like a vine, his icy cold limbs locked around his body, with a face serene and fair, his breath thin to the point where Pitch seriously considered a possibility that Jack died in his bed for almost a minute.<br/>
He kicked him out soon after the almost forgotten feeling of being not alone rushed in, filling him to the brim.</p><p> </p><p>Jack’s not the worst flatmate anyone can wish for. He has a thing for open windows, sure, sitting frozen on the windowsill for hours, watching birds, cats and children without a single blink, his light blue eyes are still, like freshly iced water. He smiles quite often, and it comes out a little too crooked sometimes; he eats frozen fish out of the fridge at 4 AM, and Pitch never saw him brushing teeth, but they’re crystal white and sharp, and sometimes Pitch gets a feeling there are too many.</p><p>He’s pretty decent at cooking, but never eats any of the food he makes. He also works somewhere, part-time, and his schedule appears to be the most random thing ever, but whenever Pitch is at home, Jack is at home too. It bothered Pitch for the first two weeks, then he just stopped thinking about it – Jack has already provided him with enough of his antics to be completely chill with literally any trivial stuff. Just once Pitch asks, not being that curious, really, just because he felt like it was his turn to start a conversation:</p><p>“Why are you always here when I come home? Don’t you have other stuff to do? Do you have friends even?”<br/>
“All my friends are far away,” says Jack with an intonation people use when they talk about being stuck in a traffic jam: a mix of slight annoyance and boredom. Pitch is about to ask where this “far away” is, when Jack adds, showing the edges of teeth in a smile that’s just slightly off to the left:<br/>
“Can’t believe I’m the first thing you see when you come home. Miss me much?”</p><p>“In your dreams. Do you have a family at least?” and it feels like the right thing to ask; at least, there should be someone who tried to teach Jack how to human and failed miserably. “A... father,” Jack frowns, tripping on the word. “He ignores me most of the time.”<br/>
Pitch is not sure what to do with the sudden confession, but Jack doesn’t seem to feel embarrassed by his sudden oversharing impulse, so Pitch brushes it away as well. After all, families are nothing more than just a pathetic mechanism holding together people who don’t like each other.</p><p> </p><p>Jack comes to him in the evenings, when Pitch works or is about to sleep. Sometimes he just sits down and watches Pitch tap-tap-tapping on the keyboard and browsing Stack Overflow, his face is unreadable; but most often he tries to get Pitch’s attention. If he succeeds, they talk shit about Pitch’s coworkers and artificial sweeteners; Jack tells him his dreams, nightmares mostly, seemingly unbothered. He always moves closer while doing so, puts his head on Pitch’s lap, and Pitch watches him with the unexplainable urge to pet his fair head. “What a nice kitten. The only thing left is to bring me a dead bird.”</p><p>“Do you want me to?” Jack asks, and Pitch can’t decide if he’s serious or not, but he can imagine Jack standing at his door with a dead pigeon in a bloodied mouth, probably way too clear, so he lowers himself over Jack’s face on his lap, looks him in the eyes and says in the lowest tone he can pull off, just in case:<br/>
“Don’t you ever think about it.”</p><p>Jack’s thin pale lips part and he laughs as if Pitch said something funny. Then he asks:<br/>
“How about a dead child, though?” with a sparkling curiosity in his voice. Pitch shrugs. “I’m chill with it. I don’t care about babies.”<br/>
“Note taken,” and Pitch doesn’t know if Jack is joking or not. He isn’t even sure that he cares.<br/>
Maybe it’s not quite right and okay, to have something they have because Pitch suspects someone else would get rid of Jack that instant. Jack wriggles and nuzzles his forehead against Pitch’s knee, managing to make the most human gesture of contentment and trust into something unreadable and borderline unsettling, with the way his neck is twisted and eyes are open, and Pitch is perfectly fine with this. Maybe, he’s not quite normal himself. He <em>is</em> attached to Jack but at the same time, he’s also attached to abandoned cities, mass suicide stories, and quiet shores that look as if at least a dozen people drowned there.</p><p>Jack raises his head and looks at Pitch for a brief second, scanning his absent look, as if he’s testing the water of his thoughts; then he slides from the chair and wraps around Pitch, squeezes him tight, and his arms under the worn blue hoodie are much stronger than they look. He puts his head on Pitch’s shoulder – his sharp jaw digs into the skin – and says under his breath, rubbing his cheek against Pitch’s face:<br/>
“Can I stay?”</p><p>Pitch thinks about Jack’s room for a second: except for that one morning, Pitch never comes there. It’s not a living space, but more like a lair, a place to cocoon and wait. It’s nothing there, really: a bed, a giant window, without any curtains, and a drawer – Pitch hasn’t even seen it opened. Deep down, maybe that’s the exact reason why Pitch almost never explicitly tells Jack to go away: the image of Jack lying down in his desolate space alone bothers him for whatever reason. He never dug through, labeled it basic human decency, and closed the case.</p><p>“Absolutely not,” Pitch sighs and reaches Jack’s head; his hair is soft, and Jack leans in way too readily. “Look at you, acting like an asshole until someone rubs you the right way.”<br/>
Jack stays anyway. Pitch is nocturnal, and all it takes for Jack is just to occupy the half of his bed and fall asleep before Pitch does.</p><p> </p><p>There are days, though, when Pitch is not in the mood for talking, not in the mood for Jack throwing all his limbs at him. Jack’s not even that malicious to enter his comfort bubble every goddamn time, it’s just he has no clue what a private space is, and there’s just too much of him sometimes. It’s almost impossible to make him leave if he doesn’t want to; sometimes Pitch just wants to shout at Jack’s face to kindly fuck himself and disappear. There are nights when Jack slips inside his room at 3 AM, cold, and jittery, saying nonsense, his nightmares taking a toll on him – <em>you were at my land, it was white, and i stepped back, and i drowned because you wanted to make me like you</em> - and most of the times Pitch is just too tired to tell him off.</p><p>The next morning after one of those nights Pitch walks straight to the bathroom, even though there is a distinct sound of water running down; if anything, this is the first thing he should do because hell, if he’s not allowed to have at least some kind of privacy, Jack’s not going to have any as well. Jack looks at him with the round eyes above the shower curtain, while Pitch splashes some water to his face. “You’re a little animal, an insufferable little shit, I hate you so much,” Pitch takes some twisted pleasure in saying this, wishing he could hiss this into Jack’s small, delicate, almost elven ear. “You’re making me so angry.”<br/>
“Want to join me?”<br/>
“So you could think you deserved it by pissing me off enough? No way.”<br/>
When he leaves, Jack spatters his back with water; it’s cold.</p><p> </p><p>This evening Jack scratches the door, almost cat-like, just a formality, and opens it right away. In the thick darkness, he’s lean, bleak, ghost-like; says quietly:<br/>
“Can I come in?”, but his tone is flat like he’s stating the fact. “You may if you at least bother to make it a question,” Pitch echoes wearily, not looking at him. His head is heavy under Jack’s gaze, he’s seeing all the code lines in double, blinking his watering eyes. The cold from the open door creeps up his legs.</p><p>“I’m coming,” Jack announces; once inside, he closes the door a bit louder than Pitch would like him to. It’s a pity that he only looks like a vampire, so the absence of an invitation can’t keep him off the threshold.<br/>
The tiny light of cinnamon-scented candle over the window thins and flickers; the sound of Jack’s breathing is audible even through the sound of a fan whirring, so Pitch runs his fingers through the hair, pushes back in his seat, and asks, keeping the palms over his face, muffled and tired:<br/>
“What did you dream about?” He’s not in the mood for bickering, anyway, and can’t bring himself to be annoyed.</p><p>“A failed test. Me, naked in public. My best friend says we’re not friends anymore. I lost a tooth. Drowned in a winter sea,” Jack runs through the list, straddling a chair. His long lanky legs prop up the bed, Pitch looks at little pale toes, one is slightly disjointed; a mark, crooked and clumsy. Did he fall or jump? Shadows behind Jack whirl up to the ceiling when he says:<br/>
“You.”</p><p>Jack is maddeningly calm, saying this. Pitch glances at his unblinking face, an eerie feeling gnaws at his guts. “You don’t have a best friend.”<br/>
“You are my best friend.”<br/>
“I don’t like you.”<br/>
“You are practically in love with me,” Jack says this as he moves closer; he shoves his legs under Pitch’s desk. “You killed me. In my dream, I mean.”</p><p>Pitch slowly reaches for him, touches his neck with the tips of his fingers and Jack grabs his hand, quickly, pressing it into the skin. Pitch curls his fingers around Jack’s neck and squeezes slightly; when his nails dig into the cold skin, Jack closes his eyes. “You said we weren’t friends anymore.”<br/>
“Yes, because you killed me. If it’s not a straight-up manifestation of unfriendliness I don’t even know what is.” He bends his neck a bit so that his skin and Pitch’s fingers could meet in every way possible.<br/>
“Tell me what I did,” Pitch asks cautiously, rubbing Jack’s neck slightly, in an attempt to find out if he’s distressed. Jack’s eyes are still closed, and he’s just a little bit too quiet, so Pitch draws closer to him until they sit almost face to face.</p><p>“You cut me. Arms, legs, body in half. Hammered each part to the piece of wood and burned me.” Jack’s face is soft and his voice is lowered as if he’s trusting Pitch with his biggest secret. He’s not disturbed, not even in the slightest, and Pitch wants to ask why his nightmares never bother him, why he looks so dreamy sometimes when telling about all the terrifying things he saw, but he thinks he knows the answer already; he’d say the same, to be honest. So he asks instead:<br/>
“Was it painful?”</p><p>Jack’s face lights up in a centimeter from his own. “It wasn’t,” he whispers. Pitch’s hand stills in Jack’s hair and all his weariness dissolves slowly, giving place to a weird feeling of excitement he can’t exactly name. “If you were just a bit more nuts I would think you just gave me an instruction.”<br/>
“Nah, not so easy,” Jack smiles, looking him in the eyes, and Pitch’s mind is somewhere in higher realms, looking at Jack’s face from aside. He’s pretty, he really is – especially if you look from the angle which makes all the angles in his face into the smooth lines. “You look really cold.”<br/>
“I am,” Jack agrees. His eyes are unmoving, like a mountain lake that just gobbled down a body, catching its twitchy legs in the water grass. Is it bad, wanting to kiss a dead fish? Certainly not worse than thinking about it, right?</p><p>“No bites,” Pitch whispers, saying this to no one in particular, and draws forward.<br/>
The next thing he sees, Jack’s eyes are wide open; he inhales sharply and tugs Pitch closer, and he tastes like an ice cube at the bottom of the paper cup, like an icicle you eat to skip the school, like the first snowflake you catch with your tongue. It’s the best kind of cold, and Pitch finds himself burning; his hand is still at the back of Jack’s head, and Pitch tugs on his hair slightly, just to see if he would complain.</p><p>He doesn’t, and Pitch kisses his smooth cheeks, saying endearments under his breath, kisses the sharp tip of his nose – Jack closes the eyes hastily, and Pitch brushes his lips over the thin eyelids too. Jack blinks and draws back, and climbs up his lap quickly, scratching Pitch’s shoulders with his long nails; he’s stronger, and faster, and taller up close, but when Pitch slides a palm under the hoodie, he feels Jack shivering under his hands. Pitch strokes his long, narrow back, presses his lips into the tiny ear, and whispers:<br/>
“Are you alright, kitten?”<br/>
That’s when Jack does bite him.</p><p> </p><p>His teeth leave a mark, a prominent, slightly curved line of tiny holes poked through the skin. There’s no blood coming out, and it slightly itches, but that’s not the reason Pitch wakes up later this night. Hell, even Jack is not the reason, he didn’t even try to stay after Pitch kicked him out of the room because when Jack threw his hoodie on the floor, with the moonlight painting him silver, Pitch got himself together and told Jack out – at least, for the night.<br/>
No, the reason is that it’s cold again in his room, and his door is wide open, and the blanket is on the floor, and it’s the middle of winter, so the temperature is way below zero outside. Pitch rolls off the bed, groaning, picks up the blanket and wraps in it, then goes outside and closes all the windows except one. He knows better this time. Then he snuggles in his bed and falls asleep fast and quick.</p><p>When he wakes up, a patch of fresh snow is spread thin over the pillow and he has one mark more. This one is deeper, wider. 
It doesn't bleed as well.</p>
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